How Obama Lost His Presidency

Our friend Andrew Breitbart has an op-ed in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Andrew traces the downfall of the Obama administration to the events of August 2009, when the American people rose up against Obamacare, and the administration and its allies responded with thuggery. An excerpt:

When the history of Barack Obama’s one-term presidency is written, August 2009 will be remembered as the turning point.

It was then that thousands of ordinary citizens began to rise up against a health care bill being forced through Congress. And it was then that the Obama administration declared war, through its union proxies, against the American people.

Obama had been elected to fix the economy. But Democrats had planned for years to use the first year of the next “progressive” presidency to push universal health care, according to the plan written in federal prison by convicted fraudster and Democrat strategist Robert Creamer. That plan declared: “To win we must not just generate understanding, but emotion — fear, revulsion, anger, disgust.” …

By early August, President Obama realized he was losing public support. So he turned to the “community organizing” techniques of his Chicago days. On Aug. 6, 2009, Jim Messina, then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff (now managing Obama’s re-election campaign), told Democrats to “punch back twice as hard.” The same day, John Sweeney, then-president of the AFL-CIO, issued a memo telling union members to show up at the town hall “battleground.”

That very evening, union thugs at a town hall meeting in Tampa assaulted a man who opposed ObamaCare, ripping the shirt off his back. And that same night in St. Louis, Ken Gladney allegedly was beaten up outside a town hall meeting as he tried to distribute Gadsden (“Don’t Tread On Me”) flags by union thugs yelling, “What kind of nigger are you?” The next day, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius thanked SEIU members for their efforts at town halls.

It didn’t stop there. On Aug. 31, left-wing organizers outside a town hall meeting in suburban Chicago instructed activists to block residents’ questions. The Gladney attack was a small part of a much larger campaign of intimidation, directed from the White House. The acquittals in the Gladney case cannot erase what happened, even though the high-flying lawyers brought in by the SEIU outmatched the rookie prosecutor. But the verdict has been seized upon by the left-wing propagandists at Media Matters, which received a hefty donation from the SEIU after the Gladney attack and which set about trying to destroy Gladney’s credibility.

I agree that the seeds of the Obama administration’s failure were sown when Obama decided to use the economic crisis as an opportunity, too good to let go to waste, to bring about the radical transformation of America rather than focusing on improving production and enabling job creation.